Data Augmentation Using Many-To-Many RNNs for Session-Aware Recommender Systems
This addresses session-aware recommendation in the travel domain, but is incremental as it adapts existing RNN approaches to a specific competition setting.
The paper tackled the problem of session-aware recommendation for travel bookings by proposing a many-to-many RNN model that predicts the next destination at each step, achieving an accuracy@4 of 0.5566 and placing 4th in the ACM WSDM WebTour 2021 Challenge.
The ACM WSDM WebTour 2021 Challenge organized by Booking.com focuses on applying Session-Aware recommender systems in the travel domain. Given a sequence of travel bookings in a user trip, we look to recommend the user's next destination. To handle the large dimensionality of the output's space, we propose a many-to-many RNN model, predicting the next destination chosen by the user at every sequence step as opposed to only the final one. We show how this is a computationally efficient alternative to doing data augmentation in a many-to-one RNN, where we consider every subsequence of a session starting from the first element. Our solution achieved 4th place in the final leaderboard, with an accuracy@4 of 0.5566.